Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (7)

Thing #8 Social Networking

August 18, 2008 First, watch this video:

Social networking services, as defined by Wikipedia, are “primarily web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups.” Many of Gene Smith’s building blocks of social sites will be found by users at various sites.

• Identity—a way of uniquely identifying people in the system
• Presence—a way of knowing who is online, available, or otherwise nearby
• Relationships—a way of describing how two users in the system are related (e.g. in Flickr, people can be contacts, friends, or family)
• Conversations—a way of talking to other people through the system
• Groups—a way of forming communities of interest
• Reputation—a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (Who's a good citizen? Who can be trusted?)
• Sharing—a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)

One of the more popular social networking sites, Facebook, was originally launched for students at Harvard College. Over the last three and a half years, its membership has been opened up and expanded to include almost anyone who has an e-mail address. Users, in addition to setting up profiles and linking to people and networks, can also pick and choose from thousands of applications.

Ning is social networking service that goes a step further than Facebook to allow anyone to build their own free social site via a set of integrated Web tools. Ning offers a site to anyone for free and display ads on Ning pages provide revenue. Features include the creation of groups, discussion forums, integrated blogs, RSS feeds, tag clouds, integrated video and photos, and personal page customization.

The site FAQ athttp://www.ning.com/help/faq-using-ning.html states: “Ning is a platform for creating your own social networks. Our passion is putting new social networks in the hands of anyone with a good idea. With Ning, your social network can be anything and for anyone. You start by choosing a combination of features (videos, blogs, photos, forums, etc.) from an ever-growing list of options. Then customize how it looks, decide if it's public or private, add your brand logo if you have one, and enable the people on your network to create their own custom personal profile pages.”

Discovery Resources:

Read 2 or 3 of the following:

• Learn More Social Networks Part 1
• Learn More Social Networks Part 2
• 7 Things You Should Know About Facebook (pdf)
• 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally
• Facebook's plan to hook up the world
• List of social networking websites
• Build Your Own Community
• Top Ten Facebook Apps for Librarians - Part One
• Top Ten Facebook Apps for Librarians - Part Two
• Top Ten Facebook Apps for Librarians - Part Three

Discovery Activity:

1. Read through the Top Ten Facebook Apps for Librarians (links above).

2. Blog about your findings. Which applications do you like? How could you use Facebook?

Optional: If you're up for the challenge and curious, join Facebook and explore the popular social networking site. Look for friends and colleagues.

OR

1. Join a Ning community and explore. Make connections. Write about what your found. What did you like?What didn't you like? Would a Ning community be useful for your work? Nings:

• ALA: http://alamembers.ning.com/
• Classroom 2.0: http://www.classroom20.com/
• Library 2.0: http://library20.ning.com/
• TeacherLibrarian: http://teacherlibrarian.ning.com/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Posted by Michael Stephens on August 18, 2008 | Comments (7)